


You

by kythen



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angels, M/M, lonely people in the universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-17 23:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2327624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kythen/pseuds/kythen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where he lives a completely ordinary life, Shinji meets an angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You

If asked a thousand times "What is love?", he would answer a thousand times with "You." in that simple, guileless manner of his. Angels had no need for justifying concepts when they could just feel. The Lilin were made that way too, he said, except that along the way they started questioning themselves and corrupting their ability to just feel.

"Are you really an angel?" Shinji would ask again, curiosity getting the better of him at the sight of this creature before him, the both of them sprawled out on their sides with the stars spread out above them, watching them.

"There we go again." Kaworu would laugh, a gentle, mirthful sound, not cruel like how some people could be when faced with questions. He shifted and the breath caught in Shinji's throat. No matter how many times he saw them, they still fascinated him, the mass of feathers gathered at Kaworu's back, almost glowing white in the dark of the night. Wings, the mark of an angel, which were almost as big as Kaworu when they were stretched out fully, looming large over their heads. "Why don't you just choose to believe instead?"

Shinji reached a hand out, transfixed by the way the wings trembled in the breeze that blew over their heads and scattered loose feathers down on them, soft and white in his hands. "It's just that I've never seen an angel before in my life. I don't think anyone has. So that makes it harder to believe you when you say that you're one."

Kaworu folded his wings in, the feathers laid out against his back. "I hope you will come to believe me. As the first Lilin who has seen an angel, it would be a bit sad to have you not believe in my existence. What do you think I am then?"

Shinji hesitated, his eyes looking to the star-dotted sky above them and then back to Kaworu. "Human. I mean, you look just like me just with the addition of something strange- I mean, not strange! But different." _And beautiful_ , he couldn't bring himself to add, biting back the word at the last minute.

"Thank you." Kaworu replied nonetheless, which was an odd reply considering what Shinji had said. But there were a lot of things Shinji didn't get about Kaworu in their one month of acquaintance. Not the wings on his back, nor his insistence on being an angel and, the most baffling, his claims of having come to love Shinji. One month was an awfully short time to fall in love with someone and if no one could have done it in all his fourteen years of living, he found it hard to believe that someone could have done it in just a month.

A month ago, there was nothing but an empty house he went back to everyday, messages piled up on the kitchen table in the form of sticky notes, each a paraphrase of the same content. He ate alone, he slept alone and he lived alone in a house that was too big for one. There was only so much absence he could take before it drove him out into the night, in search of places that held others like him, anyone who could tell him about the warmth of having someone by your side and about the world which was really full of people and not just him alone.

But roads were hard to follow in the night and he found himself further away from people the more he ran. Instead, he found himself along the outskirts of town, a torn-up sign telling him that this was the way out of Tokyo-3 and that he was too far from the rest of the people he was searching for. He could never do anything right in his life even if his life depended on it and with this in mind, he stepped off the road and into the wild grass by the side of the road.

He didn't know where he was going. He just knew that he had to put one foot before the other and maybe he would go somewhere. The lights were scarce here and the moon unfriendly enough not to show up tonight, leaving him blind in the dark the further he went. Thorns from stray weeds tugged at his clothes and unearthed roots threatened to trip him up, making him stumble. Still, he moved on, filled with a hollow, desperate need to get somewhere, anywhere that wasn't where he was before.

When his foot finally hit something hard, forcing him to stop and really look at where he was, he saw a building before him which would have been magnificent if not for the fact that it laid in ruins, its concrete skeleton slicing through the sky while chunks of debris littered the ground around it. What his foot had connected with was one of its pieces with warped metal poles sticking out of it like a bizarre spider, and he stepped around it cautiously.

_What had happened here?_ he wondered, curiosity creeping into the jumble of emotions he was feeling. He laid a hand against the part of the building that was still intact, surprised to find himself short of breath as if he had just ran a great distance. The night air in autumn was chilly but not as unforgiving as it was in winter and he unbuttoned the first few buttons on the coat he had thrown over himself in his haste to get out of the house.

Shinji rounded the building, barely making out the outline of windows which were devoid of glass, and a door which was now a gaping hole into the ruined building. He noticed something - words, maybe - on the side of the doorway as he went in, but it was too dark to make out what it said and he left that aside as he went in.

There was barely any difference between the inside of the building and outside. The ceiling had collapsed right through and the night sky showed above him when he looked up, the stars twinkling back at him through the concrete frame made up of the parts of the walls that still stood strong. The floor under his feet was mostly intact, made out of a familiar pattern of squares reminiscent of those found in large corporate buildings or departmental stores. He picked his way carefully across the floor, conscious of the crumbled concrete that would fall under his weight and the gaping holes that showed nothing but darkness under the floor.

There were stairs across the building from him and he headed for them, intent on climbing them even though there obviously wasn't an intact level above him. With his full focus on the stairs, he didn't notice the presence of someone else in the building with him until he heard the first cry of a piano, ringing out sharply against the fallen walls around him. Shinji stopped in his tracks, fear gripping him suddenly as the sound continued, one key at a time until the different notes blended together into a song.

There was someone else in here with him, who sat before a piano with his fingers dancing across the piano keys and who was most definitely not human when Shinji finally caught a glimpse of him. He had pale skin and even paler hair which seemed to make him glow in the darkness and added to the ethereal air about him. But what the most startling thing was what appeared to be a pair of wings attached to his back, flared out behind him and moving with him as he played the piano fervently.

There was something almost private about this recital that made Shinji stumble back from the scene, feeling his way blindly back to the entrance of the building, the sight of this ethereal being burned brightly into his eyes. Cautiousness thrown to the wind, his foot dropped into one of the holes in the floor he had been trying so hard to avoid previously and he fell backwards to avoid falling right into the basement.

The sound of the piano stopped and Shinji held his breath, praying that he hadn't actually made that much noise when he fell. If he was lucky, maybe the piano player would have been so immersed in his music that he wouldn't have heard him.

"Hello." came a voice from somewhere behind him, surprised yet pleased at the same time. "Are you alright?"

"Yes." Shinji squeaked out, scrambling to his feet hurriedly and making to escape. Anyone else here would most definitely not be human, the piano player most of all, and he would rather avoid all encounters of the supernatural kind. Before he could stand up properly, a hand entered his vision, palm-up and waiting for Shinji to take it.

"Do you need help?" the piano player asked and smiled, the wings behind him fluffing up behind his back. He looked no older than Shinji himself with a countenance that was pleasant and looked well-suited to smiling. His eyes, however, were red, the colour barely perceivable if not for the way they seemed to glow, just like the rest of him.

Shinji shook his head and returned the smile with a more ill-looking one of his own as he backed up and away from the piano player. His legs were jelly under him, his own enemy as he ran lopsidedly in a direction that didn't have a smiling, winged, person-shaped creature blocking his way. It wasn't until he managed to find his way out of the building that he realised he wasn't being followed.

He chanced a glance back as he put more distance between him and the building, and then several more when he affirmed that there was no one on his tail. He slowed down, half wondering if he should go back, but common sense directed him to keep moving. The first rays of the sun had started to show, illuminating the violet clouds that drifted lazily through the air. In a few hours, school would start and he would not be able to make it on time with him being so far from home. Worst still, he hadn't the faintest idea of where he was with nothing but the ruins of an old building as his only landmark.

Shinji started to pick up his pace, finding his own haphazard trail through the grass, his sight gradually returning to him as the sun started to rise. Maybe if he ran, he could still make it for the first bell.

\---

There was no one at home when he finally made it back, the hem of his pants ruined beyond his ability to repair them and his shoes coated thickly with mud and other unrecognisable substances. The sun had properly risen and he hazarded a guess at the time, not late enough that school had already started but not early enough to give him enough time to make it before the first class. He touched a hand to the panel at the side of the door, his other hand already easing off his mud-splattered shoes as the door slid open. The coat was next and Shinji grimaced at the mess decorating its lower half, the part that went past his waist and reached down to his knees. The shoes he hid in a corner of the cabinet and the coat he shoved into the laundry hamper as he dashed about in the cramped space that was his apartment.

His uniform had already been laid out neatly the night before and his schoolbag packed, but his excursion out into the night had left a layer of perspiration and grime on his skin which he frantically scrubbed at while taking possibly the shortest shower of his life. Clean and clad in his uniform, he dashed to the front door - the first lesson had probably started already - and then skidded to a stop when he realised that he was missing his schoolbag.

When Shinji took his first step back into his room, he knew that there was something wrong about this picture. Less than a minute before, he was sure that his window had been closed and the wind shut out of his room, where it couldn't tug at his curtains or blow his homework assessments to the floor. Now it was open, letting a light breeze circulate through his room and making the things in his room that didn't quite have enough weight twitch as the wind touched them.

As always, his schoolbag was by his desk and he took a tentative step in its direction and then another when nothing seemed to happen. He reached down to pick it up by its straps then turned back to the window, intending to close it before it messed up his room.

"Hello again." the winged boy from before greeted him, his wings beating the air behind him and keeping him level with Shinji's window. "May I come in?"

Shinji dropped his bag.

After the events of last night and a frantic run through the field in fear of being followed, he thought that he could forget about everything; the burst of emotions that had flooded him so suddenly and forced him out into the night, as well as the crumbled building in the middle of nowhere and its unearthly piano-playing occupant. When he had returned home, he thought that he could get on with his usual quiet life, made up of an endless cycle between school and home and nothing else but the road connecting them in between. He never expected to encounter any of them ever again, let alone have one of them follow him home, and seeing this boy with wings smile at him from outside of his window made his heart stop cold as if the blood in his veins had just decided to stop flowing there and then. But somehow, his body could still move and it urged him to turn away from the window and run.

Shinji had never been particularly athletic and so it was a bit of a joke that he was running this much in such a short span of time. He didn't feel like laughing though as he tore through the front door of his apartment and down the shared corridor. With nothing but socks on his feet, he slipped every now and then while running, his hand slamming down on the wall beside him whenever he felt his feet slide out from under him.

"You should be careful." came a voice from next to him and he found the winged boy in the air next to him, steadily keeping up with him.

"What do you want?" Shinji yelled at him, aggravated and more than a bit fearful.

"I'm curious, that's all. So I followed you."

They reached the end of the corridor and Shinji came to a halt, the winged boy doing the same outside the building, looking down expectantly at him.

"About what?"

"About you."

\---

They had ended up back at his apartment and it was surreal to see the boy's wings, white as snow, against the backdrop of his drab home. He was going to miss the first lesson completely at this rate but in the face of something like this, he felt that it was inevitable. He didn't even know why he allowed this stranger into his home when he had been running from him last night and then again just a few minutes before. Somehow, it just happened when he walked back to his front door and let himself back in, the winged boy trailing in behind him with his massive wings folded shut against his back as he squeezed through the narrow doorway.

He didn't feel comfortable offering the winged boy tea, because he wasn't entirely sure if he was what you considered a guest and so they both settled awkwardly in front of the space before the door. In fact, he didn't feel entirely comfortable with letting the winged boy into his home at all. Years of consuming fiction had left him with an imagination that helpfully supplied him with all the likely scenarios that could happen within the next five seconds or so, which were all things he would rather avoid. But things like this never happened in real life and so he was completely at lost with what to do when something that only existed in fiction broke into his world. Running didn't seem to help, not when he had tried it twice and had not managed to shake the winged boy off at all.

"What are you?" Shinji asked him abruptly after close to a minute of terse silence.

The wings at the boy's back extended slightly, the tips of its feathers brushing against the walls. The faint smile was present again when he answered, "I'm an angel."

Fear struck Shinji as years of history learnt in school reminded him of the ongoing war between the Angels and humans. The Angels he knew looked nothing like this boy, each with their own frightening appearance and towering over the tallest buildings in Tokyo-3. He had not been old enough to remember the last Angel that had struck Tokyo-3, nor the Evangelion and its fearless pilot who had taken it down, but he did remember the death toll, its number printed out in his textbook and seared into the minds of every citizen of this city.

"An Angel?" Shinji echoed, backing away from the boy. He and his wings were blocking the way to his front door and Shinji wished that he had had more foresight to stand in a better position.

"Yes, an angel." the boy carried on, unfazed by Shinji's distress. "Not the kind that you Lilin are used to though."

"There's only one kind of Angel." Shinji said warily.

The boy shook his head. "There were angels before the Angels you are so familiar with appeared. Winged beings, the messengers of God, have you heard of them?"

"We stopped believing in God in the 20th century." The textbooks had said so. Christianity and all other religions had died out with the Second Impact, people turning to science to restore the world to what it used to be. In the twenty-first century, people were more inclined to believe in the strength of the Evangelions and the pilots who controlled them rather than gods that never appeared even as half of the world was wiped out. If angels were meant to be god's messengers, he wondered why they had named the greatest threats to humanity after them.

"That's a pity." the boy said. "If it makes you uncomfortable, you can call me by my name instead. I'm Kaworu."

There was something about the sheer sincerity in Kaworu's words that made Shinji want to trust him and believe that he wasn't anything dangerous, even with his bizarre appearance and unknown history. There was a small, hopeful look in Kaworu's eyes as Shinji hesitated, thinking about what the right course of action would be in response to Kaworu. Finally, Shinji looked away and mumbled out his own name in response.

"Ikari Shinji, is it?" The smile on Kaworu's face brightened. "It's nice to make your acquaintance."

The first period was most definitely over by now and if he really rushed, he could make it in time for third period. He just didn't feel like leaving now.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't quite figured out where this is going so updates are going to take forever. (sorry)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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